When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

  “At least you have a sense of humor when you’re delirious,” my mother said.

  “It’s up to you if you’d rather stay down here for a while. I realize how tight everything is upstairs. But no one’s taking your room over, and Lola will be upstairs.”

  I sipped the cold ginger ale, and my stomach began to settle.

  “If your temperature goes up again, I want you to call me. Call me anyway, okay? We’ll talk about the rest when you’re feeling better,” Mom said and took off for work.

  I remember turning on my side and Cynthia looming in at one point to say she had to go to work. “I like Ajay for you,” she said. “Rest up.”

  The next time I woke up I took my temperature, and the lights on the wand flashed in a frantic pattern as if I were heading toward a runway. The numbers blurred together, and I drifted away again.

  I was in Yellowstone, a crowd gathered in the parking lot. “There’s a bear in that car,” a tall, angular woman said. I pressed into the group of onlookers clustered around the vehicle—all those cameras and phones out taking pictures. Looking inside, I saw the black bear wedged behind the steering wheel. He was skittish from the flashing lights. A man in camp gear hurried over, grabbed my arm, and began to push me toward the passenger side of the car. “I want to get a picture of the two of you,” he said. Everyone looked at me, waiting for me to behave. He opened the passenger-side door. “Slip in and put your arm around his shoulders.”

  I tried to untangle myself.

  “I pushed the seat back as far as it would go,” he said, “to make you comfortable.”

  The bear, tightly pinned, had had enough. He started to claw into the plastic-and-foam rubber visor and snapped off the rearview mirror.

  “Go on!” a woman in a big pair of sunglasses called.

  A man said, “Chicken!”

  Clinging to the doorframe, I locked my arms and legs and arched my back to avoid the bear’s reach. Beads of snot dripped from his nostrils, and his breath steamed the windows. He turned and looked at me. There were several people pushing me now. My fingers bent back, and I lost my grip and I fell into the seat next to him. But instead of attacking me the bear started waving for everyone to clear the path. He reached for the keys and fired up the engine. Traveling through the park, we followed a series of exit signs. I tried the door, but it was locked. The windows were jammed. I felt something touch my neck. My heart stopped when I saw Nan Kaminski in the backseat with her mother, Dorothy.

  I reached back, and she dug something sharp into my palm. Her mother signaled to me by closing her eyes. She touched one of her eyelids as if to say, Here. The bear became distracted when we got to an elk crossing. I opened my fist and saw that the girl had given me a knife. It had made a cut in my hand.

  “Go on,” the mother whispered. She made another gesture, a quick sweeping motion, as if to say, Hurry! Wondering if I could ever forgive myself, I drove the tip of the knife into one of the bear’s eyes. He bellowed with pain, and when he reached for his eye he drove the knife in further.

  I sat on the passenger side of the car, watching the bear weep blood. The mother, who had become my mother, said to get out and pull the front seat forward. I did this, and she and Nan, who had become Lola, followed me out of the car, and the three of us ran into the woods. “Shouldn’t I stop and call someone?” I kept saying. But they pulled me along, and when we had moved a few hundred feet from the car, there was an explosion that lifted us off the ground.

  I felt like one of those Ambien poppers when I finally surfaced in Cynthia’s closet. I was wearing a silk 1940s movie-star gown that was so long I had to hike the skirt up to walk. I found that all the hanging items in her closet had been thrown onto her bed or spilled onto the floor. Slipping out of the gown, I stood by the window in her bedroom and considered the uniform gray sky. Cynthia didn’t believe in clocks, and she must have taken her laptop with her. My phone was out of juice. I was clueless about time. I borrowed a T-shirt and jeans and found my jacket hanging in the hall closet, my shoes by the door. She had left me a note with a few bucks just in case and told me I could stay as long as I wanted.

  I walked over to Howard Street in a functional delirium. After running my pass through the turnstile, I went up the stairs to the northbound side of the L. There weren’t many people. I began to think that if I had kept my father awake that day in the car, every last thing would be different now.

  Framed posters told me to see a Gauguin exhibit at the Art Institute and get an advanced degree and not spit and report any suspicious activities and buy a fruit bouquet and submit my body to medical experimentation for which there would be modest compensation. Gradually moving to the far end of the platform, I leaned around a partition to see our building and the snow piled in our yard, the sculpture Mom was working on. There was a softness, a haze around everything. I got up to the edge of the platform and studied the rails as a train pulled away.

  I felt hot again and opened my coat and looked out at our building.

  My father’s shape slowly filled my window, everything reduced to his outline. He was taking over. I wanted him to see me out on the tracks so he could understand what he was doing, what he had done.

  I looked down the length of the platform. Only a handful of people stood under the sheltered areas, reading those posters, staring off into space. A boy sat with his mother on a bench. A woman with a black scarf had her hair tied up so that the thinnest strand wouldn’t catch in the wind. A man coughed and coughed. When I looked at the rails, I was aware that the one farthest from the platform had 750 volts of electricity running through it.

  Waiting until the next train took off, I jumped into the gravel between the two main rails of the track as I imagined Ajay had done. I walked north with great care until I stood in front of the yard. I looked at my father.

  He was looking my way.

  A man at the end of the platform yelled, “Hey, get the fuck off there!”

  I heard someone else shout, “Call 911.”

  A guy in a hoodie and leather jacket started taking pictures of me with his phone. He seemed eager for blood sport, an image to send out to his friends. Maybe I had less than three minutes left. The wall that enclosed our yard came halfway up to the platform. The gap between it and the edge of the ties was six feet at most. I began to think Ajay used that wall to push off from rather than dropping straight down. When a strong vibration hit the ties, I looked up to see the headlights of an Evanston-bound train in the distance. It seemed early, but it was like all the trains that rode my days and nights—the ones that kept coming.

  There was a raspy overhead speaker under the eaves of the platform that blurted something. I wondered if I could settle a score for Mr. Kaminski—if I could make his loss my father’s loss. My mother would never have to find out about Dorothy and Nan, but he would understand.

  It was when I tried to tell myself that Lola would be better off without me that I woke up. I saw him turn away from the window and disappear, and with only moments left I jumped.

  There was a split second when I thought I was going to pitch over the wall or break on top of it. But I pushed off with my hands, my body torqued, my right hand dragged halfway down the wall, and I dropped into the underpass, going limp. The sound of the train rushing overhead.

  I waited a minute or more for an alarm but heard nothing.

  Counting to ten, I pulled myself up from a filthy, soaking-wet mattress and hobbled toward the break in the fence off Howard, the one behind the liquor store. I saw my hand bleeding. It’s hard to say when I had felt that good. Not because of the blood, the abrasions, some mark of courage. I had no thirst for pain or combat with myself. But there was something I relished in that moment of pure flight from my father.

  I was suddenly famished. Stopping at the coffee shop, I realized that it didn’t seem out of the norm for a bleeding individual to drop into a booth for several cups of thin coffee before the next battle.

  In the bathroom I sa
w what a mess I was. I washed my face and hands a few times and held a wad of paper towels against the cut.

  Grabbing a spot by the window, I watched people coming and going around the L station. I considered the jeweler across the street. Cynthia had said his shop was nothing but fenced watches and fenced rings with the occasional necklace pulled off a dead person from a nearby funeral home. She said if he were a legitimate jeweler, the big clock over the door wouldn’t be fourteen minutes off—that the guy even liked to steal time. It was one of her standing jokes. I had a bowl of soup, and whether it was one o’clock or one fourteen or twelve forty-six, I made my way back to Cynthia’s.

  I poured alcohol on my hand, timing this so I could cry out just as a train went by, and then I stopped being a child about it. I went through Cynthia’s antibiotic cream as if it were body lotion and wrapped my hand in gauze. The line Cynthia called the accidental line was obliterated. My father and I both had our right hands covered in bandages now, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that.

  Richard

  I woke to a series of mechanical noises that made me think of an old cash register or an adding machine. I had fallen back to sleep, and it was one in the afternoon. I found Liz working at the kitchen table.

  “Hi, beautiful,” I said and came around behind her and kissed her neck. “I think the gin did me in.” I sat down, and she gave me a look I wouldn’t call tender but maybe warm.

  “You’ll be rested for work tomorrow.”

  “What was going on at Cindy’s this morning?” I asked.

  “Cynthia’s. Mona spent the night with the flu. And then it seems Mr. Kapur went looking for his grandson, and pretty soon the place was Grand Central,” she said.

  “What is it?” I asked, nodding at the contraption. There was a wheel on top containing the alphabet and the numbers 1 through 10 along with double and triple 0s. It had a large lever on the side like a slot-machine handle.

  “Watch,” she said. Sliding out a drawer, she fixed a small metal plate in a groove. She pushed this back into the machine and moved the wheel, drawing the lever down with each turn like one of those label makers. When she was done she pulled the drawer open and took out the metal. It was warm to the touch and had my full name stamped into it.

  “It’s a dog-tag embosser,” she said. “Someone left it behind at one of my jobs.”

  “And you wanted this because?”

  “An idea I’m working on. Go see how much I’ve done.”

  I grabbed my glasses, and from Mona’s window I could see that Liz’s sculpture was coming along nicely. It was hard to tell from that angle, but I guessed it was five feet high. She had cut and welded an array of metals, making something that looked both solid and fragile at the same time.

  “Better than the Watts Towers,” I said, joining her again.

  “One of my inspirations,” she said, looking pleased. “Help yourself if you want breakfast,” she teased. “I’m going down to the basement to find a couple of things and switch the laundry. I have my cell if Lola calls from Alice’s house ready to be picked up. If she uses the landline, come get me, okay?”

  “Sure. I’m happy to help in the basement, you know.”

  “Everything’s under control. When I come up we can talk.”

  I wasn’t sure if she meant to sound stiff or if it was just the way she turned from the table, ready to tackle the next task on her list. Liz could be fiercely self-directed.

  A train rattled through, and the cups under the cabinet did their dance. She grabbed one almost as if to stop it. Pouring a coffee, she slid this and the sugar my way and then started down the stairs with the next batch of wash. Maybe it was just the thick feeling in my head from too much sleep, but I could imagine a day when Liz would be able to stop working and devote herself fully to her artwork and keeping Lola on track. Mona might find her peace, I thought, once she was in school.

  My first boss in the industry used to say, People who buy insurance are pessimists, and people who sell insurance are optimists. So I think you know what I’m expecting. I truly hated that man, but if ever there was a time to pull myself together and believe we’d find a way through things, this was it.

  My cup was half drained when a pain opened up in my gut. Liz used to have Tums lying around so she could get her dose of daily calcium. I began a hunt and found two tablets at the bottom of a plastic bottle in the drawer by her bed.

  Gazing into Mona’s room, I went over to the dresser. Camera bodies and lenses and books on photography were everywhere. Mona had a slew of film canisters, photos, and negatives marked and labeled in boxes. Some were in Liz’s handwriting. She had books on the desk and floor, in heaps and stacks. Mona had always been a reader like her mother. I wanted to pull all of the drawers open and rifle through the closet, thinking if I understood who she was now I could find some way to start a conversation, to work through and get beyond the worst. Her pack was on the bed, and it would have been easy to start with those compartments, but I knew I couldn’t do that.

  As I looked out the window I realized I had left my distance glasses on the kitchen table. But sometimes, unlike my precise, clear-eyed daughter, I actually enjoyed the blur. I couldn’t drive at night or watch a movie without them, but in a funny way seeing the shapes of the trains move by gave me rest.

  Mona’s blind was off the window, and I wondered if it was broken or if she had pulled it down intentionally. Without curtains or blinds her window made a frame of the L platform and the trains. Maybe she saw everything in a frame the way Liz saw the world as weight and mass.

  I spotted a workman out on the tracks, a lone figure, and I thought about what that’s like, walking along the ties, watching out for the third rail, always out there under the elements. When I heard a clatter I turned suddenly, but I realized it was the holder for a woman’s razor that Mona kept sticking to the tiles of the tub that kept coming loose and dropping against the porcelain. By the time I turned back the workman had moved on, and it was a good thing because a second later a train came through. I couldn’t do that kind of work.

  When Liz came upstairs I had showered and shaved and eaten lunch. I insisted on taking the laundry basket from her hands. I put it in the living room.

  “Any word from the girls?” she asked.

  I came over, held her around the waist, and whispered, “Not yet. Maybe we have a little more time.” I moved my hands over her belly and down between her legs.

  But she said she was dying of thirst. I let her go, and she poured a glass of water but didn’t drink any of it. In fact she just stood there for a while, holding that glass. “I brought up some of my old dresses to see if they might fit Mona. I think the ivory one would look pretty if I took up the hem.”

  “You think she’ll appreciate the time you put in?” I asked. I had my doubts. Mostly Mona seemed to wear black.

  She gave me the oddest look. “I think Mona appreciates what I do. Absolutely.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I sat down across from her in front of a pile of dog tags. “Mind if I keep working while we talk?” she said. “I’m getting behind.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Last night … I felt a little like myself again, you know?” She turned the wheel and pulled the lever down.

  “Me too,” I said.

  “How to put this? Each of us is kind of spinning in our own orbits right now, and …” She went on to the next number, pulled the lever, and tossed the completed tag onto a separate pile. “I’m trying to figure out how we’re all going to get from here to there.”

  I thought she was asking for my help. So I said, “We’ll look for a place to rent in Evanston in a couple of months. It might not be everything we want at first, but …”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She opened the little drawer and pulled out the fresh dog tag and added it to the pile. “Let me start over.”

  In all our years I couldn’t remember a time she had seemed this uneasy with me.


  “Lola is having a hard time fitting in at school. I’m afraid she’s been picking fights.”

  I let out a deep breath. “Lola’s always been headstrong. She’ll adjust.”

  “And I’ve put four extra locks on the door,” she said. “A couple of nights Mona’s woken up on the stairs. She’s getting worse, not better.”

  I wished she would stop working on the tags. “I’ll be able keep her on my new insurance plan until she’s twenty-six. Maybe if she went to one of those sleep clinics …”

  “I’ll certainly explore that with her.”

  “I think the real problem is this boyfriend. He came over yesterday, looking for her.”

  “Okay. I’m not sure why you didn’t tell me,” she said.

  “I didn’t want to upset you. He’s around forty.”

  “I see.”

  “He’s a fashion photographer. He’s arrogant. Smoked the whole time he was here even though I asked him to put his cigarette out. What’s the word? Snide.”

  “If you got a separate place,” she said, pulling the lever again, “for a while anyway, we could take our time and—”

  “All of our money.” Staring into the pile of bright metal, I said, “These are all addresses.”

  “Even if we had another bedroom, the girls need to adjust. If you had your own place, maybe we could start fresh.”

  “But you said you felt like yourself last night. Maybe if you could wait just a little on the next tag …”

  She stopped and gathered and released her hair at the back of her head and looked at me. “We don’t have any privacy.”

  “Mona said she wanted me to move out.”

  “You must feel ganged up on. But it would be good to consider a new arrangement.”

  “I plan to put in long days at the firm. I have to show them I can outperform the young guys. By the time I come home Lola will be just about asleep, and I’ll get up and take my shower and be out of the house as early as you say so Mona can have her space.”

  “Richard,” she said.